‘What’s up doc’, used to be the famous and favourite phrase of many for years. It was introduced by the roadrunner comic figure. And now WhatsApp has become the nation’s favourite communications method.

Encrypted communications have been used by criminals for over a decade and now the UK government has finally succumbed to using it and enables people to subscribe to this messaging method.

We are using WhatsApp for our communications and we are aware that there are very big WhatsApp groups around for Tower Hamlets residents. We, however, are quite selective on whom we are enabling to participate in our groups and carefully check each person prior to allowing them in. To join our WhatsApp group, you’ll need to formally join because we use it as a membership tool and as we are busy fighting crime, we need to keep our members safe, hence subscription is essential.

Once you have WhatsApp and are a member of a group, that can be any group, you will see that people can see each other’s numbers and so it happens that others contact you without invite to pass on their view of the world. Those views can be quite dangerous at times and we’d encourage you to forward such contact to the relevant police authorities.

Electronic communications are used by all sorts of people and unfortunately terrorists and criminals use it to contact young or vulnerable people without their parents knowing etc.

Being in a safe chatting environment is essential to successfully fight crime. If you are on one of our groups and other members contact you unsolicited let us know immediately if you are feeling intimidated. We’ll remove people who abuse our systems.

One safe option is to create a community with an announcement channel, on which nobody sees any other participants nor their numbers.